Liza Ambrossio (@lizaambrossio) creates images stemming from her family history, trauma, and personal psychology. Liza was emancipated from her family at just sixteen years old. At a time where she was between childhood and becoming a young adult, she discovered photography as a way to process what she was going through at this difficult time. Ambrossio started photographing and creating pieces using family photographs that she had her mother’s housekeeper steal for her. She left a hell-like experience of living with a mentally ill mother to an equally hell-like experience of being isolated from everyone she had ever known and loved. While on her own and through college, Liza worked as a photographer for a local newspaper, often photographing murder scenes. Upon graduating from college in Mexico City, she was awarded a scholarship to study at PIC.A (PHotoEspaña) School of Photo in Madrid.
Blood Orange grew from the project The Rage of Devotion. The two are innately connected. The Rage of Devotion is a series of images created between 2008 – 2018. Through this project Liza explores themes of witchcraft, evil, mental illness, love, violence, religious and moral limits, and the breaking away of the “traditional” role of women. Family photographs are used alongside original created works allowing the viewer to be immersed in Liza’s psychology and her history. The visuals created show men being threatened by women. Liza learned her female ancestors practiced witchcraft, often using it to curse and harm other women though, it was traditionally used as emotional and psychological protection in response to the machismo culture.
Through Blood Orange Liza explores her lucid nightmares that among a nomadic lifestyle and inherited family trauma led to speculations of paranoid sleep psychosis. She believes the traumas people experience influence their genetic line and directly affect their futures. “Paranoid sleep psychosis is a contemporary portrait of the chaos that appeals to sublimate the emotional death that Ambrossio decided to give her entire family to be able to cure herself of the hatred, anger and sadness she felt for the macho orthodoxy in which her life worked in.” Blood Orange shares Liza’s mental imagery as she was descending into a place of emotional survival.
The photographs in the series Blood Orange investigate visual themes common in dreams such as drowning, levitation, blood, and spiders. The work feels like anger, loneliness, freedom, and destiny. Feeling the need to connect with the provenance of humanity while defying feelings of displacement from all she has known, Liza creates this chronology as a means of healing and endurance.
Liza grew up in Mexico City and currently splits her time between Paris and Madrid. Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Europe, and Mexico. She has been awarded several prestigious awards including PhEST in Italy and the FNAC New Talent in Spain.